<?php
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$xhtml = array(
	'<{title}>' => 'Preparing a cross stitch pattern',
	'takedown' => '2017-11-01',
	'<{body}>' => <<<END
<img src="/img/CC_BY-SA_4.0/y.st./weblog/2019/06/05.jpg" alt="Plant life" class="framed-centred-image" width="800" height="480"/>
<section id="drudgery">
	<h2>Drudgery</h2>
	<p>
		The local university wrote back asking for an exact time I wanted to schedule my appointment for, and they&apos;d see if they had it open.
		What a painful way to find an appointment time.
		Hunt and peck?
		If one&apos;s not available, guess another?
		That sort of tactic doesn&apos;t lend itself well to email.
		I&apos;d already told them I wanted an appointment before noon.
		Could they not simply list the appointments they had open before noon?
		Or could they not just assign me some random appointment before that time that they had open?
		I don&apos;t actually think assigning me a random appointment that fit my criteria of &quot;before noon&quot; would be a good idea; I&apos;m just a bit annoyed.
		In my case, the random appointment would work just fine, but for other people, maybe not so much.
	</p>
	<p>
		Anyway, I reiterated what I&apos;d said before, but made it a bit more explicit: any appointment window from about 01:00 (long before they open) to 13:00 (I&apos;d need to start by about noon at the latest, but could stay after that by a bit to finish the exam) would be fine.
		When I said I could be there as early as 01:00, I was thinking about the $a[EUGLUG] meeting and how long it&apos;d take to get home then back to the university, as I hadn&apos;t yet thought about the fact that I could cut the meeting short.
		The most important thing about the meeting is that I go, not that I make it there on time or stay the full length.
		It&apos;s the bike trip there and back, the exercise, that I need most.
		Then, after once again giving a range, I said that if they wanted me to choose a particular time, I guessed I&apos;d go with 10:00.
		I wasn&apos;t sure how they&apos;d react to a refusal to pick a specific time, not knowing what they had available, so I made sure to avoid that issue altogether by just picking a time.
		Later would have been more convenient for me.
		Probably 11:00 would be best.
	</p>
	<p>
		Their response was that they had an appointment at 08:30 available for me.
		They didn&apos;t have the specific time I&apos;d requested available, and if I&apos;d had to hunt and peck to find a time, it would have taken forever.
		08:30 ...
		That&apos;s one of the last times I would have guessed.
		First of all, I would have guessed at all full hour increments, and forgotten that they offer appointments on the half hour.
		And secondly, that&apos;s one of their earlier appointments, so I wouldn&apos;t have guessed at )8:00 or 09:00 until near the end, given that I&apos;d be thinking about the late night return trip from $a[EUGLUG] the day prior.
		This is why I specify ranges when making appointments via email.
		I&apos;ll never be able to guess what slots you have open unless you&apos;ve got a lot of them available.
		And it sounds like they don&apos;t this time.
		Anyway, I&apos;ll probably take off from the meeting early to get some rest before the test.
		Thank Squiddy though I was able to make the appointment via email this time after all.
		I really didn&apos;t want to add a surprise bike trip to Eugene to my to-do list for today.
	</p>
	<p>
		My discussion post for the day:
	</p>
	<blockquote>
		<p>
			You&apos;re completely right.
			The decision to move to the cloud should be made on a case by case basis.
			The cloud is not a one-size-fits-all solution, and not all companies should use it.
			I&apos;d argue, in fact, that most shouldn&apos;t.
		</p>
		<p>
			You make a good point about non-technical companies though.
			Some companies don&apos;t have a technical department that can handle these sorts of things, and forming a technical department is an expense they might not be able to deal with.
			Yet at the same time, these companies can&apos;t stay off the Internet, as it&apos;d be the death of their business.
			Hiring a cloud company might be the right move in such situations.
			I mean, there are pretty heavy consequences for moving to the cloud, but when the alternative is being unable to compete in today&apos;s market, you pretty much have to deal with those consequences.
			Not that a company without a technical department is likely to understand the implications of moving to the cloud anyway.
			Many of those implications are technical in nature.
		</p>
	</blockquote>
</section>
<section id="diet">
	<h2>Dietary intake</h2>
	<p>
		For breakfast, I had 82 grams of cereal and 234 grams of soy milk.
	</p>
	<p>
		I&apos;d planned to make that Aztec salad, but I really didn&apos;t want to, because it takes so long.
		I kept putting it off, and eventually I was starving.
		I ended up eating a bunch of pretzels instead of lunch.
	</p>
	<p>
		After eating 164 grams of pretzels, I got to work on the salad for dinner.
		It took over an hour to make, though part of that was because I doubled the recipe.
		I didn&apos;t pay attention to which spoon I was using though, and ended up adding way too much coriander because I got the spoons mixed up.
		The salad doesn&apos;t taste as good, but it&apos;s still very edible.
		I had 399 grams of it total for dinner and a later snack.
	</p>
</section>
<section id="errands">
	<h2>Errands</h2>
	<p>
		I really shouldn&apos;t&apos;ve put off returning bottles yesterday.
		I did it to artificially create an errand trip for today, but there wasn&apos;t any need for that.
		I already had my pay cheque to pick up at work and deposit.
	</p>
	<p>
		After returning bottles and depositing my pay cheque, I checked out a craft store to see what brands of embroidery floss they carry.
		I&apos;m not one to care about brands, but each company has it&apos;s own colour-numbering system, completely incompatible with the numbering systems used by the other companies.
		There&apos;s no standard.
		It&apos;s really stupid.
		I&apos;ve got a neighbour that wants to learn to cross stitch, so hopefully during this break, I&apos;ll be able to work with them on that.
		They probably have their own patterns they want to work with, but being likely from some proprietary book, the patterns aren&apos;t likely to be free-culture-compatible, so I&apos;ll want to bring my own pattern for the project I work on.
		Using <a hrek="apt:kxstitch">KXStitch</a>, I can translate an image into a cross stitch pattern, but the program needs to know which of three companies&apos; colour-numbering schemes to use, so I needed to know which brands of floss I&apos;ve got access to.
		It looks like I&apos;ve only got access to DMC floss at the local craft store, so now I know to use the DMC palette option in KXStitch.
		I&apos;ll have to return at some other point with the list of colours I actually need, now that I was able to generate that list.
	</p>
</section>
END
);
